![Shinto Shrine in the morning mist](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_21_9__1920x825/public/2026-07/iStock-1342417907.jpg?itok=-JtjKhh9) 

 



 

#  Apotheosis in Japan  

 





July 21, 2026

 

 

 [ Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm ](https://hub.williams.edu/religion/faculty/jason-josephson/) 

There are countless myths of divine transcendence and apotheosis in the history of religions: heroes set ablaze as constellations, gods born from the bones of giants, martyrs elevated through suffering and deed. However, accounts of divine descent—the divine made profane, godhood lost—are more elusive. I begin my account of apotheosis in Japan with one of those elusive descents, the supposed fall of a divine emperor declared to be a mortal man.

On New Year’s Day 1946, a god was said to fall. Emperor Hirohito issued what has since become known as the “Humanity Declaration,” a tight and cryptically worded imperial rescript—a formal proclamation issued in the emperor’s name—that still echoes through Japan’s political unconscious. The textbook account of the speech is familiar: Under Allied pressure, Hirohito announced that his divinity was a “false conception” rooted in “legends and myths.” The emperor admitted he was not “a living god.” He was merely a mortal. This, we’re told, shattered a sacred illusion and plunged postwar Japan into a crisis of meaning. Or perhaps Hirohito’s announcement revealed to the Japanese that the emperor was not a deity, after all, but was an ordinary man with ordinary interests and affinities, famously, for Mickey Mouse and marine biology. The emperor was relegated to a symbolic, highly circumscribed, constitutional role, and this was thought to usher in a secular, democratic political order.\[[1](#notes)\] Recast, it is said that this living god admitted he was a fraud and then the scaffolding of sacral authority collapsed. A secular democracy was born. Behind this widely circulated and reproduced narrative lies a subtler fiction that the divinity of the Japanese emperor represented either an unbroken Japanese tradition or a novel claim invented for the 1889 Japanese Meiji Constitution (promulgated during the Meiji era, 1868–1912). Both assumptions are demonstrably false.

A deeper problem with the episode appears when reading Japanese and non-Japanese press coverage of the imperial rescript side by side. Western journalistic outlets like the *New York Times* hailed “Hirohito’s Move to Abjure Divinity” as a landmark in “Japanese history” and “one of the most shattering events in Japan since the arrival of Commodore Perry.”\[[2](#notes)\] Japanese newspapers, such as *Mainichi Shinbun* 毎日新聞, made no mention of the emperor’s divinity, reading the very same declaration as an imperial affirmation of “trust and affection,” not a shattering event at all.\[[3](#notes)\] I return to this dissonance later, but part of the difference in interpretations is a matter of translation.

Conventional non-Japanese accounts that treat the 1946 rescript as a renunciation of the emperor’s divine status turn almost entirely on a single phrase that is rendered in English as “living god,” but the actual Japanese term in the rescript, *akitsumi kami* 現御神, means something else entirely. Occupation authorities, rather than Japanese leaders, produced the initial draft of Japanese emperor’s statement, but the term *akitsumi kami* was not in the earlier wording; it was a late insertion by the emperor’s vice chamberlain Kinoshita Michio 木下道雄 (1887–1974), who later admitted that the expression was so obscure that it had to be explained to cabinet ministers, never mind to members of the public.\[[4](#notes)\] *Akitsumi* means “manifest,” so the emperor’s claim was that he was not a “manifest” *kami* but did not completely deny being a *kami*. Crucially, the semantic distance between *kami* and “God” is significant, and the relationship between sovereignty and divinity that underpinned imperial authority in Japan was nothing like the one the Allies thought they were dismantling. Embedded in the ideological crosscurrents of his age, Emperor Hirohito reveals that his sacral aura was shaped as much by imported European political theologies as it was by indigenous Japanese traditions. He never did, in fact, relinquish the divine mantle.

The main focus of this entry is less Hirohito himself than the emperor's supposed de-deification as a departure point from which to map the contours of apotheosis in Japan. Fundamentally, I aim to crack open deeper tensions between transcendence and embodiment, tradition and rupture, myth and law. The argument that follows moves through three inter-related axes—deification as domestication, deification as sacrifice, and auto-apotheosis—and then circles back to explore Emperor Hirohito at the intersection of sovereignty, lineage, and sacrality. This concerns not only the logic by which rulers and rebels became gods, but also the very mutability of divinity. I argue that imperial apotheosis could carry an undercurrent of ambivalence, framing sovereign power as something venerated and at the same time ritually contained.



 

 

 

##  Deification as Domestication 

> I, Dōken 道賢—now called Nichizō 日蔵—first took up the path of ascetic practice on Mount Kinpu 金峯山 in the spring of the second month of the sixteenth year of Engi \[916 CE\], when I was twelve years old.

So begins what purports to be the first-hand testimony of a Buddhist ascetic’s otherworldly journey that is preserved under the title *Dōken Shōnin Meidoki* 道賢上人冥途記 (A Record of Dōken Shōnin’s Journey in the Afterlife) in the *Fusō ryakki* 扶桑略記 (Brief Chronicle of the Mulberry Isles, 1074–1169), edited by Kōen Shōnin 皇円上人.\[[5](#notes)\] Dōken sketches his monastic pedigree—twenty-six years of seasonal austerities in the mountains, a lifetime shaped by the rigors of spiritual discipline—and then the narrative shifts to describe a recent crisis of disasters:

> In recent years, numerous disasters had troubled the realm. I saw and heard things that made me feel as if I were half-dead, and I was plagued by strange dreams. The movements of the heavenly bodies and the divinations of *yin* and *yang* repeatedly produced ominous signs. Therefore, in order to strengthen my spirit-power (*reigen* 霊験), I forswore life in the capital and climbed deeper than ever into the mountains. There I redoubled my austerities, both for my own sake and for the sake of the realm’s peace and prosperity. I vowed to keep silent, fast, and contemplate the Buddha for twenty-one days.
> 
> At midday on the first day of the eighth month of the fourth year of Tengyō \[941\], while absorbed in my rites, I was suddenly struck with a high fever. My throat and tongue dried up, and I was unable to breathe. Knowing that I could not speak or call for help, I wept and struggled simply for breath. Then my breathing stopped and I died.\[[6](#notes)\]

Dōken’s tale does not end with death or even with this source. His account of what happened was retold for centuries, celebrating his visionary passage through the postmortem realms, first to the heavens and then to the underworld. It is a rare account of a medieval Japanese near-death experience, and it is a vivid catalogue of encounters with Buddhas and deities.

In a moment of startling intensity, Dōken beholds a great celestial being who manifests in a burst of rainbow light. This awe-inspiring figure, identified as Daijō Tenjin 太政天神, “the Divine Heavenly Chancellor,” declares that it was once a man named Sugawara no Michizane 菅原道眞. The once-human god explains that he commands a vast army of demons, dragons, and wrathful subordinate deities and that in fact he is the source of the disasters that plague the realm. His wrath is tempered by his encounter with Buddhist teachings, but it still smolders and can only be averted by his regular worship. It would seem that the taming quality of the Buddha’s teachings is powerful but not powerful enough to fully appease ambivalent deities without further ritual appeasement.

Before turning to the historical figure later deified as Daijō Tenjin, some details about the Japanese devotional landscape are in order, specifically, for non-specialists, the conceptual cartography that structures his relationship to Buddhism, Shinto, and the category of *kami*. Despite the popular assumption that Japan is a religiously pluralist environment dominated by at least two “religions,” reading that category schema onto the past is anachronistic, for, in fact, the notion of *religions* as separate traditions does not apply to premodern Japan.

In the medieval period, to simplify things significantly, Japanese thinkers imported a Chinese expression evoking “the unity of the three teachings” (三教合一Chinese pronunciation *sanjiao heyi*; Japanese *sankyō gōitsu*). Although far from a stable list, in China the three teachings (*jiao* 教) were often considered to be Confucianism (*rujiao* 儒教), Buddhism (*fojiao* 佛敎), and Daoism (*daojiao*道教). At the outset, I want to underscore that this term 教 *jiao* or “*oshie*” does not map well onto the intrinsic or extrinsic features of the contemporary category we call “religion.”\[[7](#notes)\] The term *oshie* is broader in its reference than “religion.” By itself, *oshie* can function as a verb meaning to teach, to instruct, or to inform; historically, the paradigmatic use and direction of the verb *oshie* was from ruler to subjects. By the time the word reached Japan, *oshie* was used in a broad sense to cover not only pedagogy but systematic knowledge in general. Thus the reference to the “three teachings” does not suggest the existence of three religions in China nor, thereby, three religions in Japan. It instead names the compatibility between three organized and overlapping knowledge traditions.

A further wrinkle is involved. When Daoism was imported to Japan, it didn’t arrive with much of an institution. But an archaic name for Daoism, namely *jindao* (神道) literally “the way of the *kami*,” was interpreted as the Japanese analogue to the third teaching in the Chinese expression above. If there were “three teachings” in China, it was presumed, then there must be a Japanese equivalent or at least the travelling classification that provided a readymade conceptual slot. In other words, in the absence of distinct institutional Daoism in Japan, this term originally linked to Daoism in China was repurposed as the designation for indigenous Japanese *kami* practices. Much later, this term *jindao* would shift in pronunciation and signification to become “Shinto.”\[[8](#notes)\] Shinto was partially the product of a displaced signifier.

The central feature of this third pedagogical tradition in Japan was a nebulous class of beings referred to as “*kami*,” today translated as “gods.” Originally, these entities were likely associated with particular places and objects. They resembled what might broadly be called “spirits.” But *kami* were also connected to clans and mythologized ancestors. Scholars continue to debate this, but by the time we have actual textual records in Japan, *kami* were already being identified with a pantheon of “deities” imported from China and India.\[[9](#notes)\] Many of these *kami* figures were themselves embedded in Buddhist and Confucian institutional worlds, and the supposed indigeneity of the *kami* misses a more complicated history, from nearly the beginning of written records, they were classed with non-Japanese spiritual entities. Rather than *kami* being a fixed and stable classification, as this entry will show, the term and category was the result of shifting meanings. Basically, there was a preexisting “slot” for local deities and rites directed to them, and that slot was found in imported versions of Buddhist and Confucian discourses, especially as part of a schema of three teachings.

Again, these three teachings did not represent separate bounded religions in the Euro-American sense. Before the seventeenth century, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Shinto in Japan were not fully separate institutions, nor were they fully autonomous discourses. The very language of *sanjiao gōitsu*, “the unity of the three teachings,” is an attempt to emphasize the common core of three systems of knowledge. Strikingly, Japanese Buddhist priests were largely the ones teaching and commenting on Confucian and Daoist texts and performing the rituals of Shinto in the first place. The pantheon of deities was often shared. The Sōtō Zen Buddhist temple of Myogonji, for example, was dedicated to the “Shinto” god Toyokawa Inari. Looked at this way, *oshie* does not refer to three “religions,” but rather to a densely interwoven field of overlapping discourses and practices, many of which were mediated through the Buddhist institution.\[[10](#notes)\]

Returning to the Buddhist ascetic Dōken, when he describes his vision of a particular *kami* called Daijō Tenjin, it occupies the fertile ground between what today might be thought of as Buddhism and Shinto. That is not unusual. Seen against this backdrop, Dōken’s vision of Daijō Tenjin exemplifies precisely how a local *kami* could emerge at the intersection of Buddhist soteriology, court politics, and ritual economies. This dynamic runs through what I present below.

The historical person, Sugawara no Michizane (845–903 CE), featured in Dōken’s vision, was a courtier, poet, and scholar of formidable reputation. After a long and distinguished career, he fell from imperial favor. Accused of treason, he was exiled to Kyushu, where he died in disgrace. After his death, calamities struck the capital. Plague swept the imperial family, lightning ignited the palace. Dōken was not alone in his view that Michizane’s vengeful spirit (*onryō* 怨霊, deified as *goryō* 御霊) was the source of these disasters. In 942, the year after Dōken’s purported visionary experience, a local spirit medium claimed she was possessed by the enraged spirit of Michizane, and he was calling out for restitution. She also suggested that Michizane could be pacified by building a shrine for him at Kitano, located at what was then the northern part of the Japanese imperial capital. Other oracles made similar pronouncements about pacifying him. Eventually, the imperial court ritually transformed Michizane into the deity Tenjin 天神 (lit. Heavenly God), and his shrine was built in Kitano in 947. From there his worship spread to other sites in Japan.\[[11](#notes)\] Over time, Michizane-*cum*-Tenjin’s divine identity shifted from an avenging ghost to a tutelary *kami* presiding over scholarship and literature. Even today, students pray to Tenjin for success on school and university entrance examinations, often leaving votive plaques covered with wishes at his many official shrines.

Michizane as ghost-turned-god indicates that apotheosis is more than reverence but can be a way to domesticate or placate a hostile entity. When Tenjin arrived at Kitano, there was already an active ritual site dedicated to placating the so-called “six *onryō*,” literally meaning “the Six Vengeful Spirits,” who were believed to be historical figures whose postmortem grievances were blamed for plagues and disasters and who were enshrined as *goryō*, meaning “honored spirits;” their enshrinement appeased their anger.\[[12](#notes)\] The historian Yamaguchi Kenji 山口健治 suggests that the term *onryō* derives from the word *oniryō* 鬼霊, literally meaning “demonic spirits,” referring to a cult of plague spirits imported from China and then retroactively identified with deceased individuals.\[[13](#notes)\] In Japan, popular belief conflated *goryō*, those vengeful spirits of wronged individuals, with pestilence gods (*ekijin* 疫神). Pestilence gods were a class of deities thought to cause illnesses and epidemics, yet when properly venerated, they were also considered capable of preventing the same calamities.\[[14](#notes)\] Worshipping them was thus often an act of political and social management—honoring such spirits forestalled further harm.

Michizane’s posthumous transformation into the deity Tenjin shows how these apotheosis processes could adapt older ritual patterns to new circumstances, including political ones. Before the tenth century, *goryō* were associated with disease, but the god Tenjin became closely linked to thunder deities (*raijin* 雷神), underscored by his enshrinement at Kitano, an older cult site dedicated to a thunder god.\[[15](#notes)\] The Japanese imperial establishment dedicated resources to performing Tenjin rites. Thus, ceremonies for *goryō* carried political overtones; they were outlets for popular discontent that allowed the ruling elite to bring potentially subversive cults under their control.\[[16](#notes)\]

This containment strategy rested on a long-standing ambivalence in Japanese conceptions about the unseen. There is a concrete legacy of an older notion of deification as an appropriate response to a wild or demonic entity that can be placed by proper ritual. Japanese sources distinguish overlapping categories such as *kami* 神 (gods), *yōkai* 妖怪 (monsters), and *oni* 鬼 (demonic figures), but these were often treated as fluid rather than strictly separate, entities could be placed between the categories.\[[17](#notes)\] Anthropologist Komatsu Kazuhiko 小松和彦 argues that ritual worship could elevate a *yōkai* 妖怪 into a *kami*, but the same dynamics could also work in reverse, allowing a *yōkai* to deteriorate into a more malevolent, demon-like form.\[[18](#notes)\] Folklorist Noriko Reider notes that this transformative logic remains evident in Japanese popular culture. She observes that in Yumemakura Baku 夢枕獏’s series’ of *Onmyōji* 陰陽師 novels, the protagonist declares that beneficial phenomena are attributed to *kami* and harmful ones to demon-like *oni*.\[[19](#notes)\]

For readers accustomed to framing Japan’s religious history as a simple binary between Buddhism versus Shinto, it may come as a surprise that a Buddhist ascetic like Dōken received visions of a deity often labeled as a Shinto god or that this same ostensibly Shinto deity could engage in Buddhist practices. The relationship between gods and Buddhas in the tenth-century was not straightforward opposition. Gods and buddhas were connected through an old Sino-Japanese formulation and slogan, attested from at least the ninth century, called *honji suijaku* 本地垂迹, often rendered in English as “original foundation, manifest traces.” This phrase suggests that local gods were not competitors to Buddhas but were actually Buddhas’ emanations. To take two examples, the god Tenjin and the Hindu deity Gaṇeśa were both read as incarnations of the Bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara. Such identifications are strategies permitting the hierarchical inclusion of local deities into a larger Buddhist framework, assimilating them into that framework’s logics while denying the deities’ true difference.\[[20](#notes)\] The logic was elastic: Any god, demon, spirit, historical figure, or text can be lifted from its native cult and then resettled in the Buddhist cosmos.\[[21](#notes)\]

Without collapsing Buddhahood into divinity or apotheosis into enlightenment, the ritual practices surrounding shifting deities’ statuses and identities emerge at the confluence of multiple orders of meaning. These rituals are not merely local customs draped in Buddhist imagery, nor are they merely Buddhist rites loosely adapted to village cults, they are deliberate fusions that produce a bricolage in which Buddhist cosmology and local ritual logics work in concert, each amplifying the other’s authority.\[[22](#notes)\] This pattern repeats.

On the eve of the Meiji Revolution in 1868, when the Meiji Japanese “emperor” (*tennō* 天皇) was officially elevated to Divine Status, discussed below, popular devotion coalesced around another *tennō* 天王 named Gozu Tennō 牛頭天王, the Ox-headed Divine King.\[[23](#notes)\] Gozu Tennō was a plague deity, revered as a minotaur-like monstrous “wild god” (*kōjin* 荒神), famed for his capriciousness and power to cause or prevent destruction, illness, and injury.\[[24](#notes)\] In a single grip, he held divine favor and divine wrath.

All that is to say, Michizane’s transformation into Tenjin was a part of a common cultural logic expressed in fluid categorizations. His spiritual identity is deliberately recalibrated, shifting Michizane from feared wrathful spirit to state-sanctioned protector, and this follows a well-established and enduring pattern. Michizane’s deification is an act of domestication, harnessing the ambivalences that once made him dangerous.



 

###  Deification and Sacrifice 

The previous section traces the spectrum between gods and demons; this section touches on an even darker underbelly of Japanese deification—apotheosis through sacrifice, encompassing acts of self-sacrifice and killing that are retroactively framed as sacrificial fulfillment. After he encountered a shrine dedicated to Fukuda no Kami 福田の神 (Field of Happiness Deity), the Japanese herbalist and travel writer Sugae Masumi 菅江真澄 (1754–1829) records the following account in the May 27 entry of his 1797 *Tsugaru no Ochi* 津軽のをち (Hinterlands of Tsugaru). Curious about the shrine’s origins, he asked a local and reported what he was told:

> I was told that near Kuroishi 黒石, at a place called Sakaimatsu 境松, there was once a dam called Sekihachimura 堰八村. It split the river into eight canals, bringing water to the surrounding rice fields. A guardhouse was built there, and a samurai was stationed to watch over it. But during a flood, the guardhouse was swept away, and the dam could no longer be constantly supervised.
> 
> A samurai named Sekihachi Tarōzaemon 堰八太郎左衛門 heard that a human sacrifice (*hitobashira* 人柱) might be effective in controlling the waters. He then prayed to the heavens and pledged himself to the earth. On the fourteenth day of the fourth month of Keichō 14 (1609), he stood at the edge of the pond, drove a sword-like stake into the ground so that it pointed toward his own belly, and cried out, “Saa, thrust!” With that, he impaled himself and was buried together with the stake.
> 
> The villagers then built an embankment at that spot and planted willow trees along its crest. From that time on, floods ceased, and water could be easily drawn into the wide rice fields. They enshrined Tarōzaemon’s spirit as a *kami* 神 called Sekihachi Myōjin 堰八明神, also revered as the Fukuda deity 福田神 or simply Sekigami 堰神 (Dam God) . . . .
> 
> Later, the land was later confiscated, and the shrine of Fukuda no Sekigami fell completely into ruin. Heavy rains continued to fall, the embankment collapsed, and the dam broke. No matter how many times it was rebuilt, it never returned to its former condition. The farmers, troubled by this, submitted a petition to the local authorities. It was feared that this was a divine curse of the god of Fukuda. The land was therefore restored to the descendants of Sekihachi in the second year of Shōhō (1645)
> 
> Hidden inside this shrine is a wooden effigy that Tarōzaemon himself carved. One of his descendants, a man named Sekihachi Yoshimiya 堰八吉宮, served as the shrine’s chief priest and built a house beside the shrine where he lived.\[[25](#notes)\]

Sugae’s account of Sekihachi is hardly unique. Japanese folklorists have uncovered many examples of *hitobashira* 人柱, literally meaning “human pillars,” which are voluntary human sacrifices offered in the lead up to constructing something or as part of the construction process.\[[26](#notes)\]

To add a philological note, the term *hashira* 柱 designates not only a physical pillar in architecture, evoking support or endurance, but in Japanese language, since at least the eighth century, the term serves as the classical counter-word for enumerating *kami*. Just as English employs collective nouns like “a flock of seagulls,” Japanese speakers use counter-words for different objects. Human sacrifices and deities are both counted in terms of “pillars.” So one might speak of “two pillars of sacrifices” or “two pillars of gods.” It is striking that this usage persists in official tallies of victims of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki who are counted as sacrifices or pillars.\[[27](#notes)\]

With respect to *hitobashira*, the human pillars, this doubling of structural prop and divine enumeration suggests that human victims entombed did not merely fortify a wall or embankment but were linguistically and ritually assimilated into the company of the gods. *Hitobashira* and broader connections between sacrifice and divinization are attested in sources ranging from the *Nihon Shoki* 日本書紀 (*Historical Chronicle of Japan*), compiled in 720 CE, and examples of *hitobashira* persist well into the late eighteenth century. One example, which also reveals the divinizing logic just described, appears in the *Zoku Kinsei Kijinden* 続近世畸人伝 (Further Biographies of Eminent People) compiled in 1798 by Ban Kōkei 伴蒿蹊 and Miguma Katen 三熊花顛. According to this account about Bizen Province, now the southern Okayama Prefecture, an embankment was raised to stem the sea in order to reclaim fertile ground for rice cultivation. To anchor the earth against the tides, a *hitobashira* was deemed essential. A young woman named Kita volunteered, sacrificing herself willingly, and she was subsequently venerated as the deity Okita Myōjin, illustrating how sacrificial victims could be ritually transformed into local gods rather than being merely commemorated.\[[28](#notes)\]

The historical record includes accounts of voluntary and involuntary human sacrifices. In 1902, the Meiji historian Fuse Senzo 布施千造 sketched a typology: some went willingly, driving stakes into their own flesh or plunging into rivers and seas; others were seized, dragged, and forced into the earth. Men and women were equally liable, but Fuse notes that involuntary victims were drawn above all from the poor and the elderly. Archaeological evidence complicates the picture. Human remains have been recovered in a number of these premodern construction sites, but it is unclear whether the remains were sacrificial victims or laborers who perished during the course of building at these sites. What has appeared in abundance are clay or wooden effigies (*hitogata* 人型), unearthed at sites ranging from Kumamoto Castle to the Ichijōdani Asakura ruins.

The contemporary historian Owada Tetsuo 小和田哲男 reads these effigies not as incidental offerings but as ritual surrogates—they are substitutes for living victims who would be offered in association with constructions. For Owada, many tales of *hitobashira* emerge in sources composed long after the structures themselves were completed, suggesting that some narratives may be retrospective legend rather than records of actual construction rites.\[[29](#notes)\] Legends of such sacrifices cling to fortresses across Japan, and they proliferate in the absence of proof. One striking subtype found nationwide describes a beautiful young woman seized during a local festival and immured as a human pillar, her restless spirit manifesting in uncanny disturbances. To impose a typology on Owada’s material, most of these stories fall into two broad kinds. In some, the human offering, voluntary or coerced, is successfully transfigured into divinity, enshrined and appeased, and in others, the apotheosis is interrupted or never attempted, leaving behind a ghost that haunts the site.\[[30](#notes)\]

In some accounts of *hitobashira*, the offerings appease a dragon (*ryū* 龍) or another preexisting deity. In these cases, the sacrifice is directed toward pacifying that external power, and the victim is not typically the focus of subsequent worship. In other accounts, no distinct deity or spirit requiring appeasement is identified; instead, the sacrificed person is then worshipped as a god. In these cases, the *hitobashira* is understood to become a guardian spirit attached to the structure itself rather than appeasing a wrathful deity. Nonetheless, in some cases the boundary collapses altogether when local rites and traditions fuse or blur the sacrificed body with the very deity they were meant to propitiate.

By the seventeenth century, a new category of deified figures called the *gimin* 義民 emerged. These are peasant martyrs who are worshipped as gods after they sacrificed their lives to lead movements on behalf of their fellow peasants. The most celebrated example is the possibly legendary Sakura Sōgorō 佐倉惣五郎. In the tale, sometime around 1653, the village headman Sōgorō sought tax relief and famine aid from his local *daimyo*, the local feudal lord who had imposed crushing levies that drove his people to ruin. When petitions through official channels failed, Sōgorō dared to appeal directly to the shogun, the military ruler of Japan. His boldness forced concessions from his local lord; it also sealed his fate. Sōgorō was crucified, his wife executed, his children burned alive. Sōgorō made a vow of vengeance, and he carried that vow into the afterlife. The local lord who ordered his death was later said to have gone mad, his house disgraced. Sōgorō’s angry spirit was pacified by worship at his grave and by the founding of a shrine to him.\[[31](#notes)\] Sōgorō-inspired prayers and actions continued long after his purported physical death. In 1853, a leader of the Minamiyama peasant uprising built a new shrine in Sōgorō’s honor, and to his followers he distributed talismans inscribed with the words “*Sōgojinrei kaiun shōri go shugo*,” meaning “Protection of the Divine Spirit of Sōgo for good fortune and victory.”\[[32](#notes)\] Six years later in 1859, peasants invoked Sōgorō once more, this time in prayers that Sōgorō strike down five corrupt officials who were extorting bribes. Even in the modern era, his name carries weight. As late as 1985, Japanese farmers resisting the construction of a new airport declared that “We are the descendants of Sōgorō.”\[[33](#notes)\]

Sōgorō was not alone among the *gimin* peasant martyrs who are worshipped as gods after their demise. Historian Hosaka Satoru catalogued nearly three hundred cases between the years of 1600 to 1868, a period in which protest leaders were commemorated through shrines, monuments, and popular stories.\[[34](#notes)\] The historian Anne Walthall analyzes a host of specific examples. In Aoki village, a certain Hirabayashi Shinshichi 平林新七, executed in 1721, was later venerated as the rice goddess Inari Daimyōjin 稲荷大明神. In Odawara, a man named Kawaguchi Ichirōbei 川口市郎兵衛 was crucified for resisting a land survey in 1681, and he was henceforth referred to as “Hachiman of the Crucifixion Site” *Haritsuke Hachiman* 張付八幡. In 1775, villagers enshrined six men executed in 1635 and worshipped them collectively as the Six Great Avatars (Rokusō Daigongen六僧大権現). As Walthall and others have shown, to evade the wrath of any *daimyo* who might otherwise punish those who too openly remembered agitators and martyrs, such veneration had to be carefully disguised through altered names, characters, or dates. Deification memorializes not just communal self-sacrifice but resistance, and apotheosis is a muted but enduring act of rebellion.\[[35](#notes)\]

 Deification through sacrifice is a recurrent modality of apotheosis in Japan. To die as a *hitobashira* was not merely to perish for the sake of construction but to pass into the register of the divine, sometimes enshrined as a guardian *kami*, sometimes lingering as a revenant when apotheosis fails. Sacrifice, in other words, is intimately related to divinization. Similarly, those who gave their lives to the benefit of their community were sometimes thought to continue their work into the next world. This logic is not confined to the Japanese archipelago. With the importation of Christianity, another deity and one already marked as a sacrificial victim, entered Japan’s cultural landscape: Christ, whose divinity was sealed through crucifixion. Cross-cultural encounters refracted local traditions of deification through sacrifice against a universalizing theology of redemptive death, further entangling martyrdom, sacrifice, and apotheosis.



 

###  Auto-Apotheosis 

A recurring pattern of Japanese deification begins with the living subject himself while still living, announcing before death that he will reappear as a divinity, and his cult centers on the very site where his body is laid to rest.\[[36](#notes)\] (For convenience, I will refer to this pattern as the “living god” form.) Around the age of forty, Matsudaira Sadanobu 松平定信 (1759–1829), *daimyo* of Shirakawa and senior councilor to the Tokugawa shogun, turned his gaze inward and declared himself divine. He commissioned a wooden statue of himself, installed it in a purpose-built hall that he named the Hall of Divine Resonance (Kan’nōden 感応殿). There, he conducted daily rites of veneration that were directed toward this statue as a ritual proxy for his own person and anticipated his posthumous divinity.\[[37](#notes)\] This was no ordinary household altar but a “living shrine” (*seishi* 生祠), a gesture of self-worship that blurs the lines between piety and hubris.

Matsudaira did not intend his cult to vanish with the end of his own lifetime. In 1820, in his “Brief Autobiography” (*Jisho ryakuden* 白書略傳), he recounted a plan to petition the Yoshida clan (see below) for a posthumous title, aspiring to the exalted name of Nation Protecting Great God (Shukoku Daimyōjin守国大明神). Matsudaira drew upon an audacious rationale: Through perfect devotion (*shisei* 至誠) to themselves and relentless self-discipline, humans might become deities. Matsudaira cast his path of self-apotheosis in the idiom of the martial arts, styling himself to be a devotee of the “Divine Martial Way” (*Shinbu no Michi,* 神武の道). He sets out these activities in his “Ascetic Record” (*Shugyō roku* 修行録), recounting his ever-increasing austerities.\[[38](#notes)\]

Matsudaira is sometimes dismissed as a colorful eccentric. Yet, the idea that a given individual might be a living god was hardly his own invention. The pioneering Shinto scholar Katō Genchi compiled no fewer than eighty-five cases of self-enshrined or popularly worshiped figures from between 1600 and the end of World War II.\[[39](#notes)\] At least three men who Matsudaira knew personally were the focus of cults while they were still alive.\[[40](#notes)\] Scholars of Japanese New Religious Movements document a boom in self-described “living gods” in the post-war period.\[[41](#notes)\]

This living god form of apotheosis differs from examples in previous sections. The transmutation of wrathful spirits into protective deities or sacrificial victims into *kami* was ancient, but Matsudaira’s example suggests something innovative. Beginning in the fifteenth century a new grammar of divinization emerged, and at its center stood the Yoshida 吉田house. The Yoshida family were a cadet branch of a hereditary clan of diviners, originally known as the Urabe 卜部, and for generations they heated tortoise shells and deer bones over fires, and then they read the resulting cracks in the shells and bones to divine the future. The Yoshida’s main clients were the imperial family.\[[42](#notes)\]

Earlier generations of Yoshida priests followed Pure Land Buddhism: engaging in typical Buddhist deathbed rituals, cremating the corpse, and consigning the ashes to Kyoto graveyards or to Kōyasan’s necropolis. Sometime during the life of Yoshida Kanetomo 吉田兼倶 (1435–1511), a new leader of the clan, this influential family began to move away from Buddhist funerary practices. Although there are debates about exactly when the change occurred, the Yoshida clan began to bury rather than cremate their departed. They would raise a small shrine (*reisha* 霊社) over the grave and then venerate their ancestor directly as a *kami*.\[[43](#notes)\] What began as a private family innovation in funeral practice spread during subsequent decades.\[[44](#notes)\] Eventually, feudal lords across Japan petitioned the Kyoto-based Yoshida or their rivals, the Shirakawa families, to confer titles of divinity (*shingō* 神号) that would sanctify their founders and ancestors as deities. In some cases, after the Yoshida granted titles, the departed became the focus of popular worship even beyond their families. In others, the posthumous title changed little about the departed, and rites associated with them vanished as the memory of the deceased faded.

When Japan was convulsed by the violent century-long civil wars of the Sengoku period (c. 1467–1600), ambitious military leaders fought for supremacy. These warlords not only sought earthly dominion but maneuvered for posthumous deification, aiming to embed their political legacies in cult and ritual. Although some scholars claim that the first of these leaders exhibiting auto-apotheosis was Oda Nobunaga 織田信長 (1534–1582), the evidence is slim.\[[45](#notes)\] Evidence is firmer in the case of the feudal lord and second so-called “great unifier of Japan,” Toyotomi Hideyoshi 豊臣秀吉 (1537–1598). Soon after Hideyoshi’s death, one of his close retainers worked with Yoshida Kanemi 吉田兼見 (1535–1610), another member of the powerful Yoshida Shintō lineage.\[[46](#notes)\] Yoshida Kanemi insisted that Hideyoshi had vowed to become a deity upon death; therefore, he should be installed and worshipped at a grand shrine on a designated site in Kyoto. The petition succeeded, and Hideyoshi’s body was enshrined as Hōkoku Daimyōjin 豊国大明神 (“Great Bright Deity of the Abundant Country”).

The glory was fleeting. Once Hideyoshi’s rival feudal lord Tokugawa Ieyasu 徳川家康 (1543–1616) secured power over a now largely unified Japan, he dismantled Hideyoshi’s cult and shrine, erasing his rival’s divine status. When Ieyasu died, Yoshida rites initially prepared his enshrinement at Mount Kunō 久能山, but the Buddhist monk Tenkai 天海 (1536–1643), one of Ieyasu’s closest advisors, persuaded his heir Hidetada 徳川秀忠 that the late shogun had willed to manifest as a Buddhist avatar. Under Tenkai’s guidance, Ieyasu was enshrined instead at Nikkō 日光, explicitly within a Buddhist institutional register, not just as a *kami* but as the Great Avatar Illuminator of the East (Tōshō Daigongen 東照大權現). In this guise, Ieyasu-*cum*-Tōshō Daigongen was venerated as a protective divinity whose postmortem providence safeguarded the Tokugawa shogunate.\[[47](#notes)\] This explicitly Buddhist framing is less of a rupture than it might seem because, as discussed above, according to the logics of *honji suijaku*, “original foundation, manifest traces” gods were often read as incarnations of Buddha or Bodhisattvas.

Deification was not merely a postmortem act. While alive, Yamazaki Ansai 山崎闇斎 (1619–1682), a former Buddhist monk turned Confucian thinker and the founder of a movement known as Suika Shintō 垂加神道, established a “living shrine” called the Suika Reisha 垂加霊社, and that shrine housed a mirror that Yamazaki claimed embodied his own “mind-god” (*shinshin* 心神).\[[48](#notes)\] In 1671, Yoshikawa Koretari, head of the Yoshida family, formally conferred the title of Suika Reisha, endorsing not only the shrine but also Yamazaki Ansai’s startling claim to his status as a living god.\[[49](#notes)\]

The choice of the mirror was no accident. Mirrors had long been tied to Shinto sanctuaries. Playing on the phonetic overlap of *kagami* 鏡, meaning “mirror,” and *kami*, meaning deity, Yamazaki declared: “The heart of the divine is like a bright mirror without a single speck of cloudiness. As a metaphorical expression of this, the use of *kagami* arose. Then the middle *ga* was dropped, giving the form *kami*.”\[[50](#notes)\] Yamazaki reinforced the association between mirrors and *kami* through folk etymology in order to legitimate his shrine that housed his mind-god while he lived and would house himself after he died, and it was the Yoshida that once again conferred and authorized godhood.

The Yoshida clan did not have a monopoly on deification, for sometimes an individual could effect auto-apotheosis without the legitimation or approval of authorities. The samurai Honda Tadatomo 本多忠朝 (1582–1615) was famously disgraced in 1614 after drunkenly failing in battle. The following year, he fought ferociously to restore his honor, and he died in combat. On his deathbed, Honda Tadatomo swore to aid anyone who wished to renounce drinking. He was enshrined at Osaka’s Ishinji 心寺, a Pure Land Buddhist temple, where today he continues to be worshipped as the God of Temperance (*Sake-fūji no Kami* 酒封じの神), helping those struggling with alcoholism.\[[51](#notes)\] The historian Satō Hirō traces a whole constellation of figures—most often samurai—who vowed to become gods after death.\[[52](#notes)\]

A distinctive formula of deification through auto-apotheosis crystallized in the fifteenth century and retained its force into the nineteenth century. The underlying logic shifted. Divinity was no longer something conferred from without, no longer the slow accrual of popular acclaim or ritual sanction. It was instead seized from within and willed into being by the one who claimed divinity, even though that status was typically actualized by successors and legitimated by ritual authorities like the Yoshida. Auto-apotheosis stood as a counter-tradition against longstanding modes of deification by asserting the sheer force of individual will over and sometimes against older economies of recognition.



 

###  Sovereignty, Lineage, and Sacrality 

In order to show the ways that notions of apotheosis persisted, I will return to the example of Emperor Hirohito featured at the opening of this entry. The notion that Japan’s road to the Second World War was paved by something called “emperor worship” circulated widely in the United States during the conflict. In *Nippon: The Crime and Punishment of Japan* (1944), the American missionary Willis Lamott insisted that “To become a modern nation in the truest sense Japan must cast aside . . . the childish nonsense of the dogma of the divinity of the emperor.”\[[53](#notes)\] Scholars have complicated the claim that “emperor worship” *per se* was the driving force behind Japanese militarism. They generally concur that an “emperor-centered political system” (*tennōsei*, 天皇制) was central to the ideology of the period, but here the consensus ends. What precise frameworks established the *tennōsei* system remains contested, and the archival record reveals that those who lived under the system understood it in strikingly different and diverse ways.\[[54](#notes)\]

Nonetheless, even in scholarly circles, it is often asserted that the Japanese emperor was designated a living god by constitutional decree in 1889, citing two articles of the Meiji Constitution.\[[55](#notes)\] To clarify, readers—particularly those steeped in the American constitutional tradition—might tend to assume that constitutions exist to limit or displace political sovereignty. Historically, many constitutions did precisely the opposite of that assumption: They formalized monarchy rather than abolishing it. Across nineteenth-century Europe, constitutional monarchies treated constitutions as juridical frameworks that stabilized monarchical power, translating older claims about kingship, inheritance, and royal inviolability into the language of modern law.

Often called Japan’s first modern constitution, the Meiji Constitution promulgated in 1889 fits squarely within the European tradition of constitutions insofar as it articulates the terms under which imperial sovereignty was to be exercised. The Meiji Constitution’s orientation would only be decisively overturned after Japan’s defeat in the Second World War, over a half century later when, under Allied occupation, the Meiji Constitution was replaced by a new constitutional order that explicitly relocated sovereignty from the emperor to the people. It is against this Meiji constitutional backdrop—not against a republican one—that Articles One and Three of Emperor Hirohito’s so-called Humanity Declaration must be read:

> Article 1: The Empire of Japan shall be reigned over and governed by an unbroken lineage (*bansei ikkei,*万世一系) of Emperors.
> 
> Article 3: The Emperor is sacred (*shinsei* 神聖) and inviolable.

Article One echoes the Shinto-inflected rhetoric of imperial descent, that is, the claim that the imperial line derives from the *kami*—especially the sun deity Amaterasu—an association that lent symbolic sacrality to imperial authority without necessarily asserting the emperor’s literal divinity. These articles were promulgated alongside an oath by the emperor to his imperial ancestors, but the text stops short of outright asserting divinity for the living emperor. Here, sovereignty is grounded in lineage not sanctity, and it does not explain why that lineage is important outside the historical claims that the imperial family can be traced backward in an unbroken line.

At first glance, perhaps Article Three does literally declare the emperor to be divine, but a closer look at the article’s textual history reveals otherwise. Circulated in the Japanese Privy Council (枢密院, Sūmitsu’in) (1888–1947), documents from debates about drafting the 1947 constitution tell a different story.\[[56](#notes)\] Article Three’s phrase “sacred and inviolable” is a near-verbatim translation of contemporary European constitutions. For instance, Article 48 of the 1876 Spanish Constitution reads: *La persona del Rey es sagrada e inviolable*, “the person of the king is sacred and inviolable.” This was no coincidence. Many countries were writing constitutions at the time, and they often drew from each other.

Hermann Roesler, the Prussian legal theorist advising Japan’s constitutional drafting committee, played a decisive role in shaping the clause. For Roesler, Article Three’s force is not in any specifically Shinto claim but in a universal doctrine of divine sovereignty. “It rests,” he wrote, “upon the notion of the divine nature and origin of the supreme power which is testified by the Christian as well as by every other religious belief and is only denied by philosophical freethinkers.” The emperor, in Roesler’s words, “holds His power from Heaven through the medium of His glorious ancestors, but not from any human authorization or concession.”\[[57](#notes)\] This is the divine right of kings translated linguistically and culturally into a non-Christian register.\[[58](#notes)\] By invoking European legal precedent and theological rationale, Roesler aimed to bolster Japanese imperial authority through a shared idiom of sacral power. The phrase “sacred and inviolable” functioned dually. In Europe, it cloaked monarchy in Christian-inflected legality; in Japan, it did analogous work by mobilizing transformed Shinto concepts but in a modern constitutional frame.

Similar to Roesler, Suematsu Kenchō 末松謙澄, future cabinet minister and prominent member of the governmental elite during the drafting of the Meiji constitution, observed, while he was in England in 1881, that the British monarchy was grounded in the king’s doubled body. When a British king dies, he writes, the “replacement of the old king’s physical body (*shintai* 身体) by the new” is such that “it is as if there has never been a change in the king’s spirit (*seishin* 精神).”\[[59](#notes)\] Japanese leaders adopted this notional ideology of sovereignty as an ideal model to craft their own version of a monarchy. Contemporary historian Fujitani Takeshi argues that Suematsu and his peers more or less consciously took inspiration from European understandings of monarchy to promote the view that the emperor’s physical body was a “receptacle” (*iremono* 入れ物) for an immortal “imperial spirit” (*tennōrei* 天皇霊).\[[60](#notes)\] In this sense, the Japanese emperor was deemed constitutionally divine insofar as the emperor was said to share a common vision of kingship with the crowned rulers of Europe.

During this period, a core contradiction faced secular nation states worldwide, not just in Japan: The secular nation state was unable to ground itself on reason alone. It needed first principles that it could not prove. It needed ethical absolutes, but these foundations could not be applied by reason alone. Citizens had to take the nation itself as a moral end, as something worth dying for. The secular nation state invariably turns to secularized religion. In the United States, this took the form of a civic catechism grounded in rights “endowed by a Creator.” In parallel to European nations’ thin secularization of Christian theological language, Japanese leaders produced equivalent legal formulations rooted in transposed Shinto terms. As I argued in *The Invention of Religion in Japan*, the putatively secular ideals of modern European nation states were often just Christian values in camouflage: political sovereignty as divine sovereignty in disguise, natural law as universalized Christian law, Protestant values repackaged as human rights, and so on. Japan, transformed into a modern nation state at gunpoint, saw the trick, and then Japan played its own trick. Japanese leaders marshaled Shinto as an ideological force and embedded it in the machinery of the nation state, producing what I have called the Shinto Secular.\[[61](#notes)\]

Shinto ideologues had a rich language of divinity from a long tradition of deification bearing inherent ambivalences. The history of the Japanese emperor is entangled with all the registers of deification, and emperors were positioned in seemingly contradictory positions with ambivalent or dangerous supernatural entities. Emperors were called upon to manage the wrathful dead and commute them into deities, often placing themselves in a subservient position to the angry dead. But emperors were also sometimes themselves depicted as wrathful spirits. In a section titled “Unki’s Prophecies,” the fourteenth-century “Chronicle of Great Peace” (*Taiheiki* 太平記) names departed emperors who became demon kings in death.\[[62](#notes)\] Cast into exile and left to die embittered, emperor Sutoku 崇徳天皇(1119–1164), was believed to have become a wrathful spirit (*onryō*) after his death, and he was deified at a shrine in Kyoto built in his honor.\[[63](#notes)\] Emperors were never made into human sacrifices, voluntary or otherwise, but they were sometimes depicted as having given an ultimate sacrifice through their death and worshipped thereafter. Drowned at the age of six in the famous Battle of Dan‑no‑ura, emperor Antoku 安徳天皇 (1178–1185) was enshrined at Akama Shrine (Akama Jingū赤間神宮). Cast retrospectively as a sacrificed child‑emperor, Antoku’s tragic death was transvalued into apotheosis, and he became a deity of sacrificial loss and a protective spirit.

By and large, emperors did not feel compelled to will themselves into *kami* after their death like other figures of self-apotheosis presented above; another model of apotheosis, or perhaps partial apotheosis, came into play, and it established divinity by ancestry or lineage. The Japanese imperial family claimed descent from the Sun Goddess Amaterasu, but that family was not alone among families staking claims to divine ancestry. Other great clans embedded their own sacral genealogies into the structure of power. The Fujiwara family traced themselves to Ame-no-Koyane no Mikoto 天児屋命, the *kami* of the Rock-Cave myth, sanctifying their roles as hereditary priests at the imperial court. The Kamo clan bound their descent to Yatagarasu 八咫烏—the three-legged crow that once guided mythical first emperor, Jimmu—thereby securing their ritual authority in Kyoto’s great shrines. Many of these families intermarried, forming a sacred court centered around the imperial family. Japan’s early political order was not defined by any solitary strand of sacral descent but by a dense web of divine filiations, and these are established through these different modes of apotheosis and deification.

Meiji ideologues resurrected the notion of divine sovereignty as ancestry, but it is a mistake to read this as an unbroken tradition. The imperial family had long been interpreted through the idiom of lineage, but lineage is not static. Indeed, the very identity of the ancestral deity itself shifted across time. Yet, much of what we call Amaterasu, the Goddess progenitor of the imperial family, whose name is usually translated today as the “Sun Goddess,” was understood quite differently in the medieval period. Amaterasu Ōmikami 天照大神, also read as Tenshō Daijin 天照大神, was often imagined to be male and identified as an incarnation of the Cosmic Buddha, Dainichi Nyorai 大日如来. This historical variability helps explain why modern invocations of divine imperial ancestry represent reinterpretation rather than simple continuity. This figure demonstrates that deities associated with lineages shifted in accordance with those who claimed them in their lineage.

In tracing the modes of apotheosis, I have left aside an entire parallel history about countless Japanese figures hailed as Buddhas or Bodhisattvas in life or in death. The imperial line itself sometimes deployed such identifications. Shōtoku Taishi 聖徳太子 (574–622), for instance, was venerated as a living manifestation of Kannon, the Bodhisattva of Compassion. After his death, he was enshrined and then worshipped across the Japanese archipelago. More broadly, the semi-equivalence of Buddhas and *kami*—expressed in the logic of *honji suijaku* in which Buddhas were the true essence and the gods but provisional traces—was a dominant doctrinal framework at certain moments. This entanglement was forcibly severed under the Meiji state through a campaign to separate Buddhas and *kami* (*shinbutsu bunri* 神仏分離), and this began in 1868. In practice, the disentanglement was never complete. Returning to Emperor Hirohito, his sacrality is often framed in the idiom of lineage and his divinity asserted as the latest link in a putatively unbroken chain of emperors going back to the Sun Goddess Amaterasu, mentioned above.

The 1889 Meiji Constitution did not spell out the putatively divine origins of the imperial family in so many words, but other official channels surely did so.\[[64](#notes)\] State sponsored textbooks traced an unbroken imperial line back to the Age of Gods. Public notice boards proclaimed that “The Emperor is the descendant of the Sun Deity and has been Master of Japan since the beginning of the world.”\[[65](#notes)\] Two points are worth emphasizing. First, such declarations were necessary because imperial divinity was not universally assumed and many subjects had no clear idea who the emperor was or what he could do.\[[66](#notes)\] Second, these declarations legitimated imperial sovereignty by relationship to ancestry and lineage.\[[67](#notes)\]

To put a fine point on it, the emperor’s divinity above all was grounded in ancestry, and Hirohito never renounced his ancestral lineage. In fact, Hirohito actively resisted pressure to renounce these. The original drafts of his proclamation prepared by the Occupation authorities declared that the emperor must reject “the mistaken idea that the Japanese are of divine descent” and must insist unequivocally that “His Majesty disavows entirely any deification or mythologizing of his own Person.”\[[68](#notes)\] It was precisely these formulations that Kinoshita Michio, Emperor Hirohito’s vice chamberlain, excised and replaced with the now-famous phrase portraying the emperor as a “manifest god.” What Hirohito ultimately renounced was never what was truly at stake in imperial sacrality. He neither repudiated his divine ancestry nor did he deny that deceased emperors were gods. In fact, on the very day the rescript was issued, he offered ritual homage to the gods of heaven and Earth at the imperial shrine.\[[69](#notes)\]



 

###  Conclusion 

From the earliest of textual sources of the Japanese state up to and through Emperor Hirohito, the Japanese historical record yields scattered instantiations of imperial, institutional, and popular apotheosis. Read together, these episodes refuse to coalesce into any single coherent theology of divinization. Instead, they disclose something more volatile: a history in which the category of *kami* perpetually destabilizes, twisting, fracturing, and reforming as transcendence assumes new political and cultural shapes.

Consider the pattern: wrathful spirits transformed into guardians, martyrs reborn as gods, rulers self-enthroned as deities, emperors wrapped in sacral lineage. These fragments reveal an economy of divinity—one that traded in power, not just piety. Japanese apotheosis was never *merely* reverential. Gods could be fashioned from enemies, rebels, and rulers alike, binding them into new orders of meaning even as those orders buckled under their own contradictions. This was a political technology. Ritual containment. A strategy of legitimation. A wager against chaos.

Hirohito’s “fall” on New Year’s Day 1946 was not a clean break from sacral kingship and into secular democracy but one more modulation in a long and unsettled history involving divinity and apotheosis in Japan. The emperor’s so-called declaration of humanity neither abolished imperial divinity nor dispelled the logic of apotheosis. It merely displaced that logic, translating the idiom of sovereignty once again but this time in the language of “humanity.” The Japanese archive does not yield a single theology of deification but a repertoire of unstable gestures—apotheosis as domestication, sacrifice, self-assertion, and lineage. Even the ascent of a secular state reinscribed deification rather than dispelling it. These god-making dynamics and shifts are not the end of appeals to transcendence for authority but are its perpetual transfiguration that reveals apotheosis without closure and a divine that precisely survives by changing form.



 

##  Notes 

\[1\] Axel Berkofsky, A Pacifist Constitution for an Armed Empire: Past and Present of Japanese Security and Defence Policies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 98; Mary L. Hanneman, Japan Faces the World, 1925–1952 (Routledge, 2013), 12; Mark Hudson, Ruins of Identity: Ethnogenesis in the Japanese Islands (University of Hawai‘i Press, 1999), 47; Stephen S. Large, Emperor Hirohito and Showa Japan: A Political Biography (Routledge, 1992), 147, 189, and 218; John Marmysz, Laughing at Nothing: Humor as a Response to Nihilism (State University of New York Press, 2003), 66; H. Neill McFarland, The Rush Hour of the Gods: A Study of New Religious Movements in Japan (Macmillan, 1967); Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, “The Emperor of Japan as Deity (Kami),” Ethnology 30, no. 3 (1991): 199–215; J. A. A. Stockwin, Governing Japan: Divided Politics in a Major Economy, 3rd ed. (Blackwell, 1999), 38.

\[2\] Lindesay Parrott, “Hirohito’s Move to Abjure Divinity,” New York Times, January 1, 1946, 1.

\[3\] Ben-Ami Shillony, “The Enigma of the Emperors: Sacred Subservience,” in The Emperors of Modern Japan, ed. Ben-Ami Shillony (Brill, 2008), 205.

\[4\] John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (W. W. Norton & Company, 1999), 316. The first references to the Japanese emperor as a “manifest god” (akitsukami現神) were in Nara.

\[5\] The title of the work is somewhat tricky to translate, as Fusō 扶桑 (Ch. Fusang) is a Classical Chinese poetic toponym for Japan, derived from the legendary Fusang tree said to grow on islands in the distant east.

\[6\] Fusō ryakki 扶桑略記, in Kokushi taikei 國史大系, ed. Kuroita Katsumi 黒板勝美, vol. 12 (Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 1929–1967), 25. See also, Kasai Masaaki 笠井昌昭, Tenjin engi no rekishi 天神縁起の歴史 (Yūzankaku Shuppan 雄山閣出版, 1973).

\[7\] For competing modern conceptions of “religion,” see Jason Ānanda Josephson \[Storm\], The Invention of Religion in Japan (University of Chicago Press, 2012), 8–11.

\[8\] Mark Teeuwen, “From Jindō to Shinto: A Concept Takes Shape,” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 29, no. 3/4 (2002): 233–63.

\[9\] Inoue Nobutaka 井上順孝 and Itō Mikiharu 伊藤幹治, “Kami kannen no tenkai 神観念の展開,” in Kamigami no tanjō to tenkai 神々の誕生と展開, ed. Shimode Sekiyo 下出積與 and Tamamuro Fumio 圭室文雄, Kōza Shintō 講座神道, vol. 1 (Ōfūsha 桜楓社, 1991).

\[10\] Only in the 1860s, as discussed below, did the Japanese government forcibly mandate a separation between Shinto and Buddhism.

\[11\] The full title is Tenman Daijizai Tenjin (天満大自在天神). Harvard holds one scroll of this source. See, “Monk Nichizō Begins His Tour of the Afterlife, from the Kitano Tenjin engi emaki,” Nambokuchō Period, 1333–92, painting, 31cm x 47.9cm (12 3/16in x 18 7/8in), Harvard Art Museums, object no. 1985.4111, <https://hvrd.art/o/211682>. For the significance of this title and the deification of Michizane, see Robert Borgen, Sugawara no Michizane and the Early Heian Court (University of Hawai‘i Press, 1986); Iyanaga Nobumi, “Honji Suijaku and the Logic of Combinatory Deities: Two Case Studies,” in Buddhas and Kami in Japan: Honji Suijaku as a Combinatory Paradigm, ed. Mark Teeuwen and Fabio Rambelli (RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), 145–76.

\[12\] Bernard Faure, Gods of Medieval Japan. Vol. 3, Rage and Revenge (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2022), 66–67.

\[13\] Yamaguchi Kenji 山口健治, Oni kō: Kotoba de tadoru minkan shinkō オニ考―コトバでたどる民間信仰 (Henkyōsha 辺境社, 2016), 161–62.

\[14\] Irene Lin, “From Thunder Child to Dharma-Protector: Dōjō Hōshi and the Buddhist Appropriation of Japanese Local Deities,” in Buddhas and Kami in Japan (Routledge, 2003), 71.

\[15\] Iyanaga Nobumi, “Honji Suijaku,” 157.

\[16\] Faure, Gods of Medieval Japan, vol. 3, 67; Neil McMullin, “On Placating the Gods and Pacifying the Populace: The Case of the Gion Goryō Cult,” History of Religions 27, no. 3 (1988): 270–93.

\[17\] More precisely, yōkai is a capacious Japanese category for uncanny or extraordinary beings ranging from monsters and unusual animals and includes oni, ghosts and other spirit entities. Folklorist Orikuchi Shinobu 折口信夫 argues that in ancient Japan oni 鬼 (a category of dangerous beings often depicted with horns and tails and translated as “demons”) and kami 神 (gods) are not in strict opposition but exist in a continuum. Orikuchi, Shinobu 折口信夫, “Shinodazuma no hanashi信田妻の話” in Orikuchi Shinobu zenshū折口信夫全集, vol. 2, (中央公論社 \[Chūō Kōronsha\], 1995,) 283–84.

\[18\] Komatsu Kazuhiko 小松和彦, Yōkaigaku shinkō 妖怪学新考 (Shōgakkan, 1994).

\[19\] Noriko T. Reider, Japanese Demon Lore: Oni from Ancient Times to the Present (Utah State University Press, 2010), 131–43.

\[20\] Josephson \[Storm\], The Invention of Religion in Japan, 27.

\[21\] See also Anna Andreeva, Assembling Shinto: Buddhist Approaches to Kami Worship in Medieval Japan, Harvard East Asian Monographs (Harvard University Asia Center, 2017) and John Breen and Mark Teeuwen, eds., Shinto in History: Ways of the Kami (Curzon Press, 2000).

\[22\] One can also see important antecedents in Daoist divination rites that I don’t have space to address here.

\[23\] Josephson \[Storm\], The Invention of Religion in Japan, 251.

\[24\] Faure, Gods of Medieval Japan, vol. 3, 107–45.

\[25\] Sugae Masumi 菅江真澄, Sugae Masumi yūranki 菅江真澄遊覧記, vol. 3, ed. Uchida Takeshi 内田武志 and Miyamoto Tsuneichi 宮本常一, Tōyō Bunko 82 (Heibonsha, 1967), 261–62.

\[26\] Yanagita Kunio 柳田國男, 「人柱と松浦佐用姫」, in Imo no chikara 妹の力, Teihon Yanagita Kunio shū 定本柳田國男集, vol. 9 (Chikuma Shobō, 1969), 99–131; Hori Ichirō, “Three Types of Redemption in Japanese Folk Religion,” in Types of Redemption, ed. Raphael J. Zwi Werblowsky and Claas Jouco Bleeker, (Brill, 1970), 105–20.

\[27\] Yamada Nobuaki, “Metaphors of a Pillar in English and Japanese.” Intercultural Communication Studies 3, no. 2 (1993): 53–64.

\[28\] Hori “Three Types of Redemption,” 112. Focusing outside the geography of the main Japanese islands, more recent work by the Japanese historian Kurihara Ken 栗原健 explores the folklore and history of Madenbashi Bridge 真玉橋 in Okinawa. He also surveys Japanese cases where human remains have been found in building foundations which might be actual hitobashira, suggesting the possibility of such practices. See Kurihara Ken 栗原健, 真玉橋に埋め込まれた祈り―沖縄の人柱伝説が意味するもの―」”Madambashi ni umekomareta inori: Okinawa no hitobashira densetsu ga imi suru mono”, Okinawa kenkyū nōto 沖縄研究ノート 32 (2023): 1–14.

\[29\] Owada Tetsuo小和田哲男, Sengoku jōkaku ni himerareta noroi to inori 戦国城郭に秘められた呪いと祈り (Yamakawa Shuppansha 山川出版社, 2022).

\[30\] See, for instance, the official webpage of Gujo Hachiman Castle: “Gujo Hachiman Castle Official Website,” <https://hachiman-castle.com/#home>.

\[31\] Anne Walthall, “Japanese Gimin: Peasant Martyrs in Popular Memory,” The American Historical Review 91, no. 5 (1986): 1076–102.

\[32\] Walthall, “Japanese Gimin,” 1084.

\[33\] Walthall, “Japanese Gimin.”

\[34\] Hosaka Satoru保坂智, “Gimin nendai hyō義民年代表“, Tōei: Hongō Kōtō Gakkō kiyō 18 (1985): 41–58).

\[35\] Walthall, “Japanese Gimin“; see also Takashi Miura, “The Emergence of a Yonaoshi God: The Apotheosis of Sano Masakoto in 1784,” in Agents of World Renewal: The Rise of Yonaoshi Gods in Japan (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2019), 21–41.

\[36\] Boot, “The Death of a Shogun,” 158.

\[37\] In Japanese ritual contexts, 感応 (kan’ō) refers to the mutual “response” or “resonance” between a deity and a devotee’s sincerity. The deity responds to or resonates with human devotion or prayers.

\[38\] Herman Ooms, Charismatic Bureaucrat: A Political Biography of Matsudaira Sadanobu, 1758–1829 (University of Chicago Press, 1975). Fukaya Kentarō深谷健太郎, Matsudaira Sadanobu kō to keishin sonnō no kyōiku 松平定信公と敬神尊王の教育 (Hokkai Shuppansha 北海出版社, 1931).

\[39\] Katō Genchi 加藤玄智, “Shinto Worship of Living Human Gods in the Religious History of Japan,” Asiatic Review 26 (1930): 575–80; see also Katō Genchi (加藤玄智), Hompō seishi no kenkyū: Seishi no shijitsu to sono shinri bunseki (本邦生祠の研究: 生祠の史実と其心理分析) \[Meiji Seitoku Kinen Gakkai (明治聖徳記念学会), 1932\].

\[40\] Ooms, Charismatic Bureaucrat, 45.

\[41\] H. Neill McFarland, The Rush Hour of the Gods: A Study of New Religious Movements in Japan (Macmillan, 1967), 71–75; Miyata Noboru 宮田登, Ikigami shinkō 生神信仰 (Kōshobō 弘文堂, 1970).

\[42\] Helen Hardacre, Shinto: A History (Oxford University Press, 2017), 25–26.

\[43\] Bernhard Scheid, Der eine und einzige Weg der Götter: Yoshida Kanetomo und die Erfindung des Shintō (Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2001). There were precedents much earlier, for instance in Fujiwara no Kamatari. See Boot, “The Death of a Shogun,” 157.

\[44\] See Elizabeth Kenney, “Shinto Funerals in the Edo Period,” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 27, no. 3/4 (2000): 239–71.

\[45\] The claim that Oda Nobunaga had himself deified can be found in Asao Naohiro, but his evidence is the claim of a Jesuit missionary Luis Frois, as there is nothing in Japanese sources from the period. See Asao Naohiro 朝尾直弘, “Shōgun kenryoku no sōshutsu” 「将軍権力」の創出, Rekishi hyōron 歴史評論 293 (1974): 20-36. For pushback against the accuracy of the Jesuit account, see Jeroen P. Lamers, Japonius Tyrannus: The Japanese Warlord Oda Nobunaga Reconsidered (Hotei Publishing, 2000), 217-24.

\[46\] The Yoshida lineage descended from the Urabe court diviners and were already involved in ritual practice associated with local deities. This was not seen as incompatible with Buddhist ritual culture, but from the late fifteenth century, especially under Yoshida Kanetomo (1435–1511), they systematized what later came to be called Yoshida Shintō, over a long period, increasingly differentiating it from Buddhist ritual forms and transforming it into an autonomous lineage of what would come to be called Shinto.

\[47\] Boot, “The Death of a Shogun.”

\[48\] Hirō Satō, 佐藤弘夫, Hitogami shinkō no keifu ヒトガミ信仰の系譜 (Iwata Shoin 岩田書院, 2012).

\[49\] Ibid,, 171.

\[50\] D. C. Holtom, “The Meaning of Kami: Chapter I. Japanese Origins,” Monumenta Nipponica 3, no. 1 (1940): 1–27, 6; I have slightly updated the translation found in Holtom.

\[51\] Satō, Hitogami shinkō, 181–82.

\[52\] Ibid., 143.

\[53\] Willis Lamott, Nippon: The Crime and Punishment of Japan (John Day Company, 1944), 9. See also Dower, Embracing Defeat, 309.

\[54\] Fujitani, Splendid Monarchy.

\[55\] Samuel Huntington, The Soldier and the State (Harvard University Press, 1985), 124–25; and David M. O’Brien and Yasuo Ohkoshi, To Dream of Dreams: Religious Freedom and Constitutional Politics in Postwar Japan (University of Hawai‘i Press, 1996), 41.

\[56\] Discussed in Josephson \[Storm\], The Invention of Religion in Japan, 229–30. See also Inoue Nobutaka 井上順孝, Kyōha Shintō no Keisei 教派神道の形成 (Kōbundō 弘文堂, 1991), 113–14.

\[57\] Josephson \[Storm\], The Invention of Religion in Japan, 230.

\[58\] Bloch had already identified the interconnection between sovereign royal power and sacrality. Marc Bloch, Les Rois thaumaturges: Étude sur le caractère surnaturel attribué à la puissance royale particulièrement en France et en Angleterre (Istra, 1924). See also Robert A. Yelle, Sovereignty and the Sacred (University of Chicago Press, 2019).

\[59\] Fujitani, Splendid Monarchy, 155–56.

\[60\] Fujitani, Splendid Monarchy, 157.

\[61\] Josephson \[Storm\], The Invention of Religion in Japan, 132–63.

\[62\] Taiheiki 太平記, vol. 3, Shin Nihon Koten Bungaku Taikei 新日本古典文学大系 56 (Iwanami Shoten 岩波書店, 1996), 187–96.

\[63\] Haruko Wakabayashi, The Seven Tengu Scrolls: Evil and the Rhetoric of Legitimacy in Medieval Japanese Buddhism (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2012), 143.

\[64\] I’m slightly splitting hairs insofar as the imperial oath that preceded the constitution evoked the “Kōsō no shinrei” 皇宗ノ神霊, the divine spirit or ancestor of the Imperial Clan.

\[65\] Posted in Tohoku 1869, see Josephson \[Storm\], The Invention of Religion in Japan, 148.

\[66\] Takashi Fujitani, Splendid Monarchy: Power and Pageantry in Modern Japan (University of California Press, 1996).

\[67\] It also evoked the claim that the emperor could alter the hierarchy of the gods, which drew directly on a broadly Confucian conception of sovereignty: the emperor as the one whose mandate authorizes the harmonization and reordering of earth and heavens alike. In this vision, imperial authority is not only political but also cosmological. The emperor is at the fulcrum of humans and gods. For some of early history, see Yuri Pines, Envisioning Eternal Empire: Chinese Political Thought of the Warring States Era (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2009). For how Confucian was imported into and transformed in Japan, see Kiri Paramore, Japanese Confucianism: A Cultural History (Cambridge University Press, 2016).

\[68\] Dower, Embracing Defeat, 312–14. See also Shillony, “The Enigma of the Emperors” 204.

\[69\] Shillony, “The Enigma of the Emperors,” 206.



 

##  Bibliography 

Andreeva, Anna. *Assembling Shinto: Buddhist Approaches to Kami Worship in Medieval Japan*. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2017.

Berkofsky, Axel. *A Pacifist Constitution for an Armed Empire: Past and Present of Japanese Security and Defence Policies*. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

Bloch, Marc. *Les Rois thaumaturges: Étude sur le caractère surnaturel attribué à la puissance royale particulièrement en France et en Angleterre*. Strasbourg: Istra, 1924.

Boot, W. J. “The Death of a Shogun: Deification in Early Modern Japan.” In *Shinto in History: Ways of the Kami*, edited by John Breen and Mark Teeuwen, 144–66. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2000.

Borgen, Robert. Sugawara no Michizane and the Early Heian Court. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1986.

Breen, John, and Mark Teeuwen, eds. *Shinto in History: Ways of the Kami*. Richmond, UK: Curzon Press, 2000.

Dower, John W. *Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II*. New York: W. W. Norton &amp; Company, 1999.

Faure, Bernard. *Gods of Medieval Japan*. Vol. 2, *Protectors and Predators*. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2015.

———. *Gods of Medieval Japan*. Vol. 3, *Rage and Revenge*. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2022.

Fukaya Kentarō深谷健太郎. *Matsudaira Sadanobu kō to keishin sonnō no kyōiku* 松平定信公と敬神尊王の教育. Hokkai Shuppansha, 1931.

Fujitani, Takashi. *Splendid Monarchy: Power and Pageantry in Modern Japan*. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.

*Fusō ryakki* 扶桑略記, in *Kokushi taikei* 國史大系, Vol. 12, edited by Kuroita Katsumi 黒板勝美. Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 1929–1967.

Hanneman, Mary L. *Japan Faces the World, 1925–1952*. London: Routledge, 2013.

Hardacre, Helen. *Shinto: A History*. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.

Holtom, D. C. “The Meaning of Kami: Chapter I. Japanese Origins.” *Monumenta Nipponica* 3, no. 1 (1940): 1–27.

Hori, Ichirō堀一郎. *Folk Religion in Japan: Continuity and Change.* Edited by Joseph M. Kitagawa and Alan L. Miller. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968.

———. “Three Types of Redemption in Japanese Folk Religion.” In *Types of Redemption*, edited by Raphael J. Zwi Werblowsky and Claas Jouco Bleeker, 105–20. Leiden: Brill, 1970.

Hudson, Mark. *Ruins of Identity: Ethnogenesis in the Japanese Islands*. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1999**.**

Huntington, Samuel. *The Soldier and the State*. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985.

Inoue Nobutaka 井上順孝. *Kyōha Shintō no Keisei* 教派神道の形成. Kōbundō, 1991.

Inoue Nobutaka 井上順孝 and Itō Mikiharu 伊藤幹治. “Kami kannen no tenkai 神観念の展開.” In *Kamigami no tanjō to tenkai 神々の誕生と展開*, edited by Shimode Sekiyo 下出積與 and Tamamuro Fumio 圭室文雄, *Kōza Shintō 講座神道*, vol. 1. Ōfūsha 桜楓社, 1991.

Iyanaga, Nobumi, “Honji Suijaku and the Logic of Combinatory Deities: Two Case Studies.” In *Buddhas and* *Kami in Japan: Honji Suijaku as a Combinatory Paradigm*, edited by Mark Teeuwen and Fabio Rambelli, 145–76. London; New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003.

Josephson \[Storm\], Jason Ānanda. *The Invention of Religion in Japan*. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.

Kasai Masaaki 笠井昌昭. *Tenjin engi no rekishi* 天神縁起の歴史. Yūzankaku Shuppan 雄山閣出版, 1973.

Katō Genchi 加藤玄智. “Shinto Worship of Living Human Gods in the Religious History of Japan,” *Asiatic Review* 26 (1930): 575–80.

———. *Hompō seishi no kenkyū: Seishi no shijitsu to sono shinri bunseki* 本邦生祠の研究: 生祠の史実と其心理分析. Meiji Seitoku Kinen Gakkai, 1932.

Kenney, Elizabeth. “Shinto Funerals in the Edo Period.” *Japanese Journal of Religious Studies* 27, no. 3/4 (2000): 239–71.

Kurihara Ken 栗原健, “Madambashi ni umekomareta inori: Okinawa no hitobashira densetsu ga imi suru mono真玉橋に埋め込まれた祈り―沖縄の人柱伝説が意味するもの―,” *Okinawa kenkyū nōto* 沖縄研究ノート 32 (2023): 1–14.

Komatsu Kazuhiko 小松和彦. *Yōkaigaku shinkō* 妖怪学新考. Shōgakkan, 1994.

Lamott, Willis. *Nippon: The Crime and Punishment of Japan*. New York: John Day Company, 1944.

Large, Stephen S. *Emperor Hirohito and Showa Japan: A Political Biography*. London: Routledge, 1992.

Lin, Irene H. “From Thunder Child to Dharma-Protector: Dōjō Hōshi and the Buddhist Appropriation of Japanese Local Deities.” In *Buddhas and Kami in Japan: Honji Suijaku as a Combinatory Paradigm*, edited by Mark Teeuwen and Fabio Rambelli, 54–76. London; New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003.

Marmysz, John. *Laughing at Nothing: Humor as a Response to Nihilism*. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2003.

McFarland, H. Neill. *The Rush Hour of the Gods: A Study of New Religious Movements in Japan*. New York: Macmillan, 1967.

McMullin, Neil. “On Placating the Gods and Pacifying the Populace: The Case of the Gion Goryō Cult.” *History of Religions* 27, no. 3 (1988): 270–93.

Miura, Takashi. *Agents of World Renewal: The Rise of Yonaoshi Gods in Japan*. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2019.

Miyata Noboru 宮田登. *Ikigami shinkō* 生神信仰. Kōshobō, 1970.

O’Brien, David M. and Yasuo Ohkoshi. *To Dream of Dreams: Religious Freedom and Constitutional Politics in Postwar Japan*. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1996.

Ohnuki-Tierney, Emiko. “The Emperor of Japan as Deity (Kami).” *Ethnology* 30, no. 3 (1991): 199–215.

Ooms, Herman. *Tokugawa Ideology: Early Constructs, 1570–1680*. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985.

———. *Charismatic Bureaucrat: A Political Biography of Matsudaira Sadanobu, 1758–1829*. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975.

Orikuchi Shinobu 折口信夫. “*Shinodazuma no hanashi*信田妻の話.” In *Orikuchi Shinobu zenshū*折口信夫全集, vol. 2, 253–92. Chūō Kōronsha, 1995.

Owada Tetsuo小和田哲男. *Sengoku jōkaku ni himerareta noroi to inori* 戦国城郭に秘められた呪いと祈り. Yamakawa Shuppansha, 2002.

Paramore, Kiri. *Japanese Confucianism: A Cultural History*. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.

Parrott, Lindesay. “Hirohito’s Move to Abjure Divinity.” *New York Times*, January 1, 1946.

Pines, Yuri. *Envisioning Eternal Empire: Chinese Political Thought of the Warring States Era*.  
Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2009.

Reider, Noriko T. *Japanese Demon Lore: Oni from Ancient Times to the Present*. Salt Lake City: Utah State University Press, 2010.

Satō Hirō 佐藤弘夫. *Hitogami shinkō no keifu*ヒトガミ信仰の系譜 . Iwata Shoin, 2012.

Scheid, Bernhard. *Der eine und einzige Weg der Götter: Yoshida Kanetomo und die Erfindung des Shintō*. Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2001.

Shillony, Ben-Ami. “The Enigma of the Emperors: Sacred Subservience.” In *The Emperors of Modern Japan*, edited by Ben-Ami Shillony, 203–30. Leiden: Brill, 2008.

Stockwin, J. A. A. *Governing Japan: Divided Politics in a Major Economy*. 3rd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999.

Sugae Masumi 菅江真澄. *Sugae Masumi yūranki* 菅江真澄遊覧記, vol. 3, edited by Uchida Takeshi 内田武志 and Miyamoto Tsuneichi 宮本常一. Tōyō Bunko 82. Heibonsha, 1967.

*Taiheiki* 太平記, vol. 3, *Shin Nihon Koten Bungaku Taikei* 新日本古典文学大系 56. Iwanami Shoten, 1996.

Teeuwen, Mark. “From Jindō to Shinto: A Concept Takes Shape.” *Japanese Journal of Religious Studies* 29, no. 3/4 (2002): 233–63.

Wakabayashi, Haruko. *The Seven Tengu Scrolls: Evil and the Rhetoric of Legitimacy in Medieval Japanese Buddhism*. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2012.

Walthall, Anne. “Japanese Gimin: Peasant Martyrs in Popular Memory.” *The American Historical Review* 91, no. 5 (1986): 1076–102.

Yamada, Nobuaki. “Metaphors of a Pillar in English and Japanese.” *Intercultural Communication Studies* 3, no. 2 (1993): 53–64.

Yamaguchi Kenji 山口健治. *Oni kō: Kotoba de tadoru minkan shinkō* オニ考―コトバでたどる民間信仰. Henkyōsha 辺境社, 2016.

Yanagita Kunio 柳田國男. “Hito-bashira to Matsura Sayohime人柱と松浦佐用姫.” In *Imo no chikara* 妹の力, *Teihon Yanagita Kunio shū* 定本柳田國男集, vol. 9, 99–131. Chikuma Shobō, 1969.

Yelle, Robert A. *Sovereignty and the Sacred*. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019.



 

Author Biography

### Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm 

 

Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm is Francis Christopher Oakley Third Century Professor of Religion and chair of Science and Technology Studies at Williams College. A historian and philosopher of the human sciences, his work traces how the categories of religion and science have been constructed, contested, and remade across Europe and East Asia. His philosophical work engages core questions of knowledge, power, and meaning within the human sciences. He is the author of four monographs: *The Invention of Religion in Japan* (2012), *The Myth of Disenchantment* (2017), *Metamodernism* (2021), and *The Genealogy of Genealogy* (2026).



 



      ![Jason Storm looking reflectively into the camera](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2026-07/JJStormPhoto.jpg?itok=rEBlLKRM) 

 

 

  

 



 

 

 

 



 

 See also:- [ Archive of Mystical Experiences ](/topic-tags/archive-mystical-experiences)